Maybe Your Great-Grandmother Really Was Cherokee

A new exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian traces black-Native American relations from the 1500s to the present.

Black folks who always heard that grandma was an Indian—Cherokee, you say?—will get a sense of affirmation from a museum exhibit that just opened at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Called “IndiVisible,” the exhibit was inspired by the Cherokees vote two years ago to exclude most members of African descent, a continuing controversy treated—quite fairly, I must say—in one of 20 panels of thoughtful text and telling photos.